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Torres withdraws support from transparency petition
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Posted on Jul 15 2008
A lawmaker has withdrawn his signature from a petition to apply the Open Government Act to the Legislature.
Rep. Stanley T. Torres, who had signed a petition to place the initiative on the ballot, said he had changed his mind about the proposed amendment to the law, which currently exempts the Legislature from the government transparency statute.
Torres, in a letter to the Attorney General’s Office, said he now believes the initiative is “unnecessary and would impede the legislative process.”
In an interview, Torres said that lawmakers are willing to open their records to public scrutiny even though they are not covered by the Open Government Act.
But Rep. Tina Sablan, the proponent of the initiative, said it should be left to the public to decide whether their lawmakers are open and transparent enough.
The petition is within 500 signatures of getting on this November election’s ballot. To be placed on the ballot, a popular initiative to amend the law must be signed by at least 20 percent of the registered voters. For this election, the threshold is about 2,400 signatures.
While the Open Government Act applies to all other government agencies, the Legislature passed a law in 1994 to exempt itself from the act’s provisions. The petition calls for a law re-applying the government transparency law to the Legislature.
Individuals interested in signing the petition or helping gather signatures may reach Sablan at 285-3935 or tinasablan@gmail.com.
